I think size is only correlated with degradation because to get really big you need a constant influx of newer, younger users, and the least discerning users are the least likely to leave.
Caveat: It’s been like 7 years since I actively used reddit, but it’s probable that none of this has changed. IME subreddits smaller than 200 basically didn’t work, they show you almost every post, there’s very little filtering. I’m not actually sure why, it could be an inevitable result of being less able to take representative samples quickly?… but post rate and vote rate should be proportional so I don’t see why that would happen? I fear that it might be something way dumber; reddit appears to use difference between upvotes and downvotes to rank, instead of the ratio (or the ratio between upvotes and reads), which predictably leads to posts from larger subreddits being more prominent even if they were no better received on average than the posts to smaller subreddits, their score will still be higher. And then reddit may have tried to correct that by just artificially boosting the prominence of posts to smaller subreddits. That’s what it feels like, anyway.
Kinda feel like the votes of people who found the post via the new queue rather than by being fairly sampled should arguably be ignored, as it gives new campers too much power to slant things.
I think size is only correlated with degradation because to get really big you need a constant influx of newer, younger users, and the least discerning users are the least likely to leave.
Caveat: It’s been like 7 years since I actively used reddit, but it’s probable that none of this has changed. IME subreddits smaller than 200 basically didn’t work, they show you almost every post, there’s very little filtering. I’m not actually sure why, it could be an inevitable result of being less able to take representative samples quickly?… but post rate and vote rate should be proportional so I don’t see why that would happen? I fear that it might be something way dumber; reddit appears to use difference between upvotes and downvotes to rank, instead of the ratio (or the ratio between upvotes and reads), which predictably leads to posts from larger subreddits being more prominent even if they were no better received on average than the posts to smaller subreddits, their score will still be higher. And then reddit may have tried to correct that by just artificially boosting the prominence of posts to smaller subreddits. That’s what it feels like, anyway.
Kinda feel like the votes of people who found the post via the new queue rather than by being fairly sampled should arguably be ignored, as it gives new campers too much power to slant things.